Travel

Fiesole, Italy, is a gloriously romantic spot. High on the hazy hills overlooking Florence, it’s the sort of over-the-top setting you associate with Merchant-Ivory movies about British girls falling in love under the Tuscan sun. Everything and everyone seems beautiful, bathed in golden light.

These are essentially the only activities that matter in Sorrento. The quintessential seaside resort town of Southern Italy does not have a real beach, and the cultural touchstones of Campania are elsewhere: classical ruins in Paestum, volcanic vestiges in Pompeii, archaeological marvels in Naples.

Memorial Day is behind us, which means we can all rest assured that it probably won’t snow again for awhile. During the next few months at least, bitter cold and icy terrain are optional — for those planning travel to Patagonia, say, or Siberia.

In the new French movie “Bicycling with Molière” — terrific fun, by the way — the actors Fabrice Lucchini and Lambert Wilson bicycle around a picturesque French island while trading barbs and lines from Molière’s play “The Misanthrope.”

The island, Île de Ré, may be unknown to most Americans. But this 18-mile spit of land north of Bordeaux and south of Brittany is a classic summer resort — the Martha’s Vineyard of France, you might say.

Wherever you stop along the way, to traverse U.S. Route 66 is to retrace the mythic American westward journey — the same journey undertaken, often with unimaginable hardship, by generations of pioneers, Jewish and otherwise.